Great story on some of the things going on in our DCS group – the folks that build the world’s leading cloud servers.

If Dell’s cloud server lab is a candy shop for geeks, littered with components and exotic system designs, then Jimmy Pike is the Willy Wonka of servers.

Pike, a jolly man with grey hair and seemingly boundless energy, is in charge of server design at Dell’s Data Center Solutions division, which builds custom servers to meet the high-density and low-power needs of online giants like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as other "hyperscale" computing customers.

The MIX Manifesto reads as a kind of intellectual rebuttal to the leadership mindset defined by the Fortune 500. The defining challenges for management going forward, it argues, are to "mend the soul of business; unleash human capabilities; foster strategic renewal; distribute power; reshape managerial minds; and seek balance and harmony."

Today, for most of us, those noble goals and big dreams are just that. They don’t have much to do with the day-to-day realities inside most real-world organizations. But we’ve all encountered organizations, we’ve all spent time with leaders in various walks of life, who are making a difference by working differently, who are creating lasting value based on the values they bring to their work, and who are determined to share the wealth their organizations create. The folks at MIX are eager for these grassroots innovators to (ahem) throw their ideas into the mix, and, thus, individually and collectively, help shape a new and more human agenda for competition, business, and leadership.

Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the MIX, Dell is a sponsor and provides my paycheck.